Stranger on a Train by Jenny Diski Read Free Book Online Page B

to remember me now, this moment, as I lie in my cabin in the dock in Tampa, wondering how it will be.

Only the Lonely
    â€˜Imagine you’re de Tocqueville. What do you think of us Americans?’
    Imagine you’re making a train reservation by phone in England. Imagine being asked such a question. I was back in the stevedore’s building calling the 1-800 number for Amtrak reservations to find a train to take me from Savannah to Phoenix. Not impossible, but not quite straightforwardly possible either. I had to get a train for two hours from Savannah to Jacksonville, Florida, where I would pick up the Sunset Limited which ran only three days a week from Orlando, Florida to Los Angeles, California, passing through Jacksonville on the way. The Jacksonville connection was leisurely. I would arrive at Jacksonville at midday, and there would be a ten-hour layover before the Sunset Limited arrived at 10.06 p.m. It would reach Tucson, Arizona, as close as I could get to Phoenix by train, forty-eight hours later. I had to stay in Savannah for three days after I disembarked, until Saturday morning, and would get to Tucson at ten o’clock the following Monday night. There had once been a train connection between Tucson and Phoenix, but no longer, so Amtrak bussed passengers to Phoenix. I’d arrive there at just past midnight on Tuesday morning, the reservation clerk at the call centre in Chicago explained, and then he explained it all again so that this time I could pay proper attention and write down the labyrinthine arrangements instead of just letting my mind wander through the sound of the mythic places and suggested vastness of time and space of my proposed journey.
    â€˜So you’re from England, by the sound of it. Have you got a minute? I guess you’re travelling around. I’m curious. Imagine you’re de Tocqueville. What do you think of us Americans?’
    His name was Mike. He told people about the train schedules and took their credit card reservations. He also wondered what Europeans thought about Americans. He was well placed to find out. But I explained that I hadn’t been travelling, and that I’d just come off a freighter and was in Tampa dock.
    â€˜Wow!’
    Now he was really excited. He had a penchant for sea travel. In fact, he was currently reading Conrad: Typhoon. So had I on the ship. What did I think of Conrad? And Melville? How was the sea journey? And Americans? I must have been to the States before. We talked about the language differences between English and American. The formality I found in American speech that lived so strangely with the vivid slang. A magical combination of ease and discomfort. That, actually, was how I found Americans. We talked about the smallness of England, the oddness for me of being able to take a train that took three full days to get from one side of the country to the other. He said he hadn’t realised.
    â€˜Really, less than a day to get from top to bottom? Jeez, that must really make a difference to how we think about the world.’
    We talked about the sea again, and he said he’d just read The Perfect Storm. I’d seen a documentary based on the book just before I left England, and I’d videoed it. I promised to send it to him when I got home though he would have to get it transferred to the US standard. He gave me his address and we said our goodbyes. My train booking had taken half an hour or more and after three weeks of small talk, I’d conversed with some passion and thought about things that seemed quite important, to a stranger called Mike somewhere in a call centre in Chicago. Welcome to America.
    *   *   *
    I spent three days in the sweaty, mad heat of Savannah adjusting to living on solid ground. My hotel (‘The Magnolia Place Inn, located in the heart of Savannah’s historic district … Built in 1878 … each room is uniquely furnished with English antiques,